Study: Bones in South African Cave Reveal New Human Relative

Ellie Briskin AP Bio C Even

September 11, 2015 Current Event 1

Study: Bones in South African Cave Reveal New Human Relative

This article tells about an exciting new development in the archaeological world; the unearthing of a new humanlike species. Found in a cave in Magaliesburg, South Africa, the bones revealing this discovery showed a mix of human-like and also primitive characteristics. Researchers named this creature Homo naledi, which both reflects our “Homo” revolutionary group and the word for “star” in the local African language. The bones did not make a totally complete picture of the species, but got fairly close, considering they found a complete jawbone, teeth, fragments of small skulls, and various pieces of limb, fingers, and lines. Scientists already can discern that the Homo naledi walked upright, and had the hands and feet of a Homo, but had soldiers and a small brain most similar to modern day apes. Right now, researchers know this creature lived roughly 2.5-2.8 million years ago. Despite the strong similarities, researcher are not claiming, and do not believe, that the Homo naledi was a direct ancestor of modern-day humans. But since a more exact date cannot be determined, it’s much more difficult for scientists to deeply examine its impact, for they have no idea what other existing beings were alive at this time. Overall, since this discovery is so new, not too much about the species is known for certain, but as more and more knowledge is uncovered we get closer and closer to painting a more complete picture of this formerly unknown organism.

I was initially drawn in with this article because I find the topic of evolutionary archaeology extremely intriguing. I think it is beyond impressive that using only pieces of a skeleton, researchers can describe an entire species’ way of life. But more than that, this discovery is definitely still relevant to people today. For starters, the fact that we are just now discovering an entire new humanlike species proves that no progress in any field is every truly completed, and that development in all areas is always possible. But more than that, the controversies surrounding what kind of species this truly is highlight the importance of varying opinions in science. If only a small group of researchers were studying this, they may come to one conclusion and declare it as fact, with no one to argue it; thus, it could become accepted as fact. But considering so many scientists are examining this and coming to so many different conclusions, none are being accepted too readily, leaving time for the truth to be discovered. Although it’s slightly irksome that we know so little about the Homo naledi, at least we’re sure that anything announced is as close to true as modern knowledge allows.

Overall, I was impressed by the presentation of this article. Its paragraphs flowed and were ordered in a way that made sense, making it extremely easy for me to follow along. I also felt that it was strengthened by the substantial number of expert quotes, which legitimized the arguments. I also enjoyed the little details that the author included to keep the readers captive, such as the fact that VIP scientists took turns kissing the reconstructed skull of the Homo naledi. However, the one criticism I have of the article is that it didn’t give the reader much knowledge about the evolutionary process, or about any other humanlike species. At the end of the article I was still wondering whether or not it was usual to have a human relative evolving alongside what would eventually become a Homo erectus, considering scientists are fairly certain that the two lines of ancestry are not directly connected. I would suggest to the author to take into account the kind of audience that would be reading his article, and possibly think to include more background information that would assist the common person in understanding the bigger evolutionary picture. But overall, I thought this article was very well put together, and maintained my interest throughout.

Press, Associated. "Study: Bones in South African Cave Reveal New Human Relative." New York Times. The New York Times Company, 10 Sept. 2015. Web. 10 Sept. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/09/10/science/ap-af-sci-human-ancestor.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=10&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0>.

Hummingbirds Find Protection Building Nests under Hawks

http://phys.org/news/2015-09-hummingbirds-hawks.html

"Hummingbirds Find Protection Building Nests under Hawks."Hummingbirds Find Protection Building Nests under Hawks. Web. 10 Sept. 2015

Hummingbirds Find Protection Building Nests under Hawks.

John George Brakatselos

Studies have shown that the hummingbird population seems to choose nests directly underneath or close to hawks. Why would they do this? The advantage of living near a huge predator like the hawk is that it provides substantial protection from predators that are proportionate to the size of the hummingbird. Nests are the main breeding ground and shelter for hummingbirds and as an animal it is the most important and most guarded possession for them to reproduce and protect offspring. In their study of 342 hummingbird nests revealed two strong patterns: hummingbirds prefer to nest in association with hawk nests and realize greater reproductive success when the associated nest is occupied by a hawk. Only 20% of hummingbird nests were built in plots without active hawk nests. Many scientists believe that the hummingbirds are not aware of the reasoning behind their nesting choices and have simply adapted to it through trial and error. When they would try to find another nesting ground with less success they would end up returning back to the areas where the hawks resided. However hawk nests aren't immune to poaching either. Some animals climb trees and eat their eggs. If this happens, the hawks will abandon their nests taking with them the protection they have been affording the hummingbirds below.

          This is one of the many examples of how animals help one another survive in their natural habitats. I feel as though sometimes animals are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. We even use the term “bird brain” as a way of calling someone stupid. Meanwhile birds are coming up with using the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” scenario all on their own. There was another case where a dolphin was trained to bring garbage out of the pool in exchange for treats. One time it found a piece of paper which it would take small pieces of to reap in the benefits. It just goes to show that when something has a set of priorities, whether human or animal, it will do whatever it can to obtain what it needs.

          I thought that this article did a very good job at providing evidence for its claims. It provided numerous statistics about these scenarios and exactly how these aspects were tested out in the real world. It is important to know where and how these facts were verified before believing in them. There are many ways in which an experiment can have significant confounding variables that invalidate the data. One thing I thought could be improved was it could have connected it to the world more and explained why these findings were significant to and important to record.

Food Industry Enlisted Academics in G.M.O. Lobbying War, Emails Show

The article that I read, Food Industry Enlisted Academics in G.M.O. Lobbying War, Emails Show, talks about major companies, such as Chipotle, Cheerios, and Stonyfield Farm, who are taking different sides to genetically modified technologies based on the opinions of their consumers. After some emails from a company called Monsanto, one of the largest seed companies in the world, were released to the public, there has been a heated debate about whether or not G.M.O. (genetically modified organisms) are safe for the American consumer to eat. G.M.O. are essentially used to create plants with better resistant to pests and disease, a longer shelf life, and to feed the world. Though this may be seen as helpful on the first glance, there are many ethical principles that are questioned when dealing with G.M.O. Often times, there are severe allergic reactions to the genetically changed food, gene transfer, in which the modified genes may escape and begin to grown on its own in the wild, and decreased antibiotic efficacy, the antibiotic features in G.M.O. may have make medications have less of an effect. According to the article, many corporations have poured money into universities to fund research on G.M.O. while others, such as the favored Chipotle Mexican Grille have moved to reduce or completely eliminate the use of genetically modified ingredients. Many of these major companies are said to be swayed by the opinions of the general public, while pro G.M.O. corporations are willing to risk their image and experiment. G.M.O. scientists claim that these foods are completely safe and that the American public is misinformed by the media. Kevin Folta, chairman of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida says, “They want to influence the public. They could conduct those studies on their own and put this information on their website. But nobody would believe them. There is a friggin’ war going on around this stuff. And everyone is looking to gain as much leverage as they can.”

This article is very important to the scientific world and the American public. Because of the growing population in not only the United States, but in the world, food and sustainable resources are becoming more and more difficult to find. With technology becoming more advanced, the knowledge and ingenuity of science is changing and expanding in many different directions. Studies in medicine and health are beginning to influence the American lifestyle, so opinions on G.M.O. may be starring in the headlines for a while. There are those who stand by organic food products, those backed by companies such as Trader Joe’s, Cheerios, and Stonyfield Farms. But there are also those who encourage genetically modified food, such as Monsanto. I personally, think that organic food is more safe and is healthier for humans but with a further investigation, I feel that G.M.O. could benefit to those who live in third world countries with limited resources and potentially be one step closer to solving world hunger.  

In my opinion, I feel that this article was written very well. The author gave a great summary of G.M.O. and provided both sides to the argument, which gave me insight as to why companies such as chose to use or disuse them. The article was detailed and provided plenty of explanations for everything, but this is where there were some issues for me. Though there was no time in which I was very confused content-wise, the article became very long, wordy, and repetitive. I became easily bored and distracted after a while. Even so, I felt that the author’s intention was to be informative. Because he included many quotes from experts on the subject: scientists or ambassadors of food companies. This ensured all of his explanations and made me feel that this information is reliable. I also noticed that the author seemed to know a lot about what he was talking about, definitely a sign of good research, and knew how to correctly portray the information in an understandable way to the reader.

Lipton, Eric. "Food Industry Enlisted Academics in G.M.O. Lobbying War, Emails Show." The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 Sept. 2015. Web. 8 Sept. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/us/food-industry-enlisted-academics-in-gmo-lobbying-war-emails-show.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0>.

The Tardigrade: Practically Invisible, Indestructible ‘Water Bears’

The article discusses a microscopic species named the tardigrade (latin for slow walker), which is in fact considered an animal. This sixteenth of an inch long creature has a snout, eight legs, and is somewhat translucent, yet manages to be repeatedly compared to a bear’s appearance, therefore earning the title as Water Bear. It’s earned much interest from the public outside simply the zoologist. It is found all over the U.S.; one just has to look through moss or lichen. This species has come to an amazement to the science population because of their traits to withstand the most extreme conditions like exposure to outer  space, antarctic conditions, and rapid temperature changes. The tardigrade has the ability to curl up into a “tun” which is the cause of its high resilience to extremities.  It’s in this tun phase that they have the capability of changing the amount of water present in their internal system. They reach a type of “suspended animation” in which their metabolism is 0.01 percent of their normal level. Scientists like Dr. Siddall concluded that without water these creatures aren’t susceptible dangers as easily as we are. Things like radiation need water to affect the organism. However scientists aren’t currently able to deduce the tardigrade’s purpose in life, ‘they merely are.’

Although the importance of the tardigrade is not known and humans cannot just suspend their animation like a tardigrade anytime in the future, the emergence of tardigrade is still important. Perhaps there’s another factor contributing to their resilience, that’s the beauty of science afterall. There are endless possibilities; science is not always one answer. Studying these creatures and their abilities further may actually come to some use to humankind in the near future. Basically this affects humanity because the very idea that a creature can accomplish what the tardigrade does offers a clue into the mysteries of life which we, as a species, hold a faint grasp of. It holds the same level of importance as an ethologist studying pill bug behavior.

My overall critique of the article would be that the author, Cornelia Dean, had a nicely written piece, excluding a few minor quirks. She nicely balanced quotes, both from average people and experts, and had a great flow to her article that made it easier to follow as a reader. She did a nice job explaining what the tardigrade is and why it is so stupefying. However she didn’t thoroughly explain exactly how it resembled a bear despite the fact it had eight legs. Also I think it was unnecessary for her to include a couple of paragraphs about Mr. Shaw, a tardigrade enthusiast. It’s just simply because we want to know more about the tardigrade not exactly how Mr. Shaw became obsessed with the topic of tardigrades.   

link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/science/the-tardigrade-water-bear.html?action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Dean, Cornelia. "The Tardigrade: Practically Invisible, Indestructible ‘Water Bears’." The New York Times. The New York Times, 07 Sept. 2015. Web. 10 Sept. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/science/the-tardigrade-water-bear.html?action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront>.

Homo Naledi, New Species in Human Lineage, Is Found in South African Cave

This article announces the fact that a new species of humans, called Homo Naledi, has recently been discovered in a South African cave. The remains of multiple bodies were enclosed in a dark and almost fully enclosed chamber that were only visible through a crack in the wall. The bones were originally seen by cavers that were visiting the cave, called Rising Star cave, and they squeezed through the seven inch wide opening to get a closer look. As soon as they realized what they were viewing, they alerted a fellow caver/geologist, who contacted Dr. Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist and a professor of human evolution in Johannesburg. Since the entrance to the cave was so narrow, assembling a team slender enough to enter proposed a challenge, but was eventually achieved and the bones were safely removed from the cave to be studied. This discovery of remains that were clearly deposited in a single spot suggests that this class of the human species was evolved enough to repeatedly place their dead in a distinct area. The age of the remains is currently undetermined, but a rough estimate puts them at between 2.5 and 2.8 million years old, and geologists put the cave at no more than 3 million years old. Scientists on the discovery team and others involved in research noted that the Homo Naledi had small skulls, curved fingers, long legs, and feet completely different from any other human species seen so far, indicating that this species was good at climbing and walking upright for long distances.

I chose this article because the information that a new human species was discovered is both highly interesting to me and also extremely relevant to all people today. It was previously thought that all of the classes of the human species had been discovered, but clearly that is not the case. This discovery is proof that science is always changing and there are always things to be explored and new things to find. With this new information, scientists can answer existing questions about the origins of life and get an even better picture of how humans evolved to present day.

This article was extremely informative and presented its topic in an organized way that was easy to follow. Any questions that I had were answered by the end of the article. One of the most positive things about the article was that it gave some background on the scientist in charge of the discovery, including his prior discoveries, and emphasized his importance in the archaeological and anthropological communities. However, a negative thing about the article was that I was unfamiliar with the current human species, so a timeline of sorts that depicted each class and their evolutionary timeframe would have been a helpful addition.

Wilford, John Noble. "Homo Naledi, New Species in Human Lineage, Is Found in South African Cave." The New York Times. The New York Times, 10 Sept. 2015. Web. 10 Sept. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/science/south-africa-fossils-new-species-human-ancestor-homo-naledi.html?action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront>.

The Fight to Save a Prairie Chicken

The Attwater’s prairie chicken has been on its way to extinction since 1919 when they started disappearing from Louisiana. Now there are only 104 of them left. Scientist have been trying to rescue the Attwater’s for years and are struggling with the task. In order to get the prairie chicken off the endangered species list they have to have 6,000 chickens for 10 years. They estimate that it will cost $192 million and take 50 years to accomplish this, but the recovery program only gets $1 million a year from the federal government. The prairie chicken has a short life span and is only expected to live about two years. They have a large number of predators that include owls, coyotes, hawks, snakes, etc. The male chickens fight with each other to prevail and find a mate. Michael Morrow said “One of two males do 87 percent of the mating.” In the 1990’s the recovery team tried to put chicks that were kept in captivity back in the wild, but eight days in all 15 of them had died. They tried to acclimate the chicks to their new environment the next time they released chicks, but that time they were decapitated by owls. They tried again and that time they all spread a disease to each other and died. At the Johnson Space Center they kept prairie chickens in captivity, but they only had one male and one female and the female was not interested in mating with the male, so no offspring were produced. From 1995 to 2007 the recovery team hatched 1,185 chicks in captivity but by the end of each year there were only 50 left. Five years ago scientist discovered that the reason that so many chicks were dying is that they rely on insects to eat in their first month of life and red fire ants were killing all of the bugs. Fire ants are an invasive species in the southwest so the team has been exterminating them and adding plants that attract bugs. This has been working and chicks in the wild have had a higher chance of survival. The Attwater’s prairie chicken has a chance of reaching 150 birds this year.

I chose this article because I wanted to learn more about what certain agencies are doing to prevent specific species from going extinct. This article shows us that it is very hard to get a species to have a stable population after it has been depleted. The discovery that the red fire ants kill off the insects that are native to the southwest could help for protecting other species that also eat bugs. The discoveries of this team could help to increase the population of the Attwater’s prairie chicken. This article gives insight into the amount of money needed to protect a species and the disparity in the funding that they get from the government.

I would have liked to know why the author of this article wanted to write about the Attwater’s prairie chicken as opposed to any other animal that is going extinct in our nation. I also think it would have been beneficial to add more about what the researchers are going to do to save the prairie chicken not just what they have tried before. The article was well written and I learned a lot from it. I would have liked to know about other methods that are being used to save different species too.

Goode, Erica. “The Fight to Save a Prairie Chicken” New York Times. 10 Sept 2015. 4 Sept 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/science/the-fight-to-save-a-prairie-chicken.html? action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0>

Delayed Effects of Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Compromise Long-term Fish Survival

            This article tackles the side effects caused by the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 that put marine and land wildlife alike at risk. After the spill occurred in Prince William Sound, populations of herring and pink salmon crashed over the following four years. However, it was impossible for this occurrence to be directly linked to the oil spill, and fish populations slowly returned to normal levels. AS a result, many believed the consequences of the spill had finally subsided, but scientists from the NOAA Fisheries have unearthed more insidious effects that disseminated crude oil has had on fish populations. Such effects have come in the form of heart defects that reduce both aerobic and cardiac capacity of pink salmon and herring, which has left them susceptible to predation. Although the crude oil has fallen in concentration greatly, its remnants, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, have absorbed through the membranes of fish embryos and consequentially caused lower growth levels and abnormal heart size. Due to this, both herring and pink salmon are dying at young ages and at an alarming rate.

            In a controlled experiment, scientists from the Northwest Fisheries Science center exposed embryonic salmon and herring to low levels of crude oil from the North Slope of Alaska, and within weeks found that PAH’s had been absorbed into their tissues. They then placed them in a clean solution, finding that compared to fish that had not been exposed to contaminated water, those that did swam at substantially slower speeds and actually had structural differences in the formation of their hearts. Mark Carls, a toxicologist who overlooked the experiment, puts it best when he says, “Crude oil is changing basic physiology, or what makes a fish a fish.”

            The topics presented in this article are noteworthy because they address a side effect of the oil spill that is not known to have been as a severe and long-lasting. While it is well known that the crude oil damaged maritime populations after the spill, there is a lack of attention paid to the adverse effects that are still presenting themselves, even after 25 years. An article as this hopefully will open people’s eyes to the dangers of deep-sea oil drilling, and will make more strict regulations that prevent such catastrophes like this, as well as the 2010 BP Oil Spill, from happening again.

            This article resonated with me particularly as I took APES last year, and we spent a good portion of the year studying the adverse side effects of such disasters. It is morally wrong to ignore such events as they happen, and they have a high propensity to effect humans as well as animals. This is most evident in the case of the BP Oil Spill, where thousands upon thousands of fishermen lost their jobs because consumers lost faith in the food quality available. As expected, this led to a domino effect that caused many restaurant owners to close, which in turn led to a downturn in the economy of the Gulf states.

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150908082807.htm